5 Tips for Creating and Maintaining Traffic on Social Networking Sites

By Christina Johns

So you have your Facebook page and your YouTube channel, and you’re even on Twitter. Now what? How do you get more people to visit your pages and, more importantly, how do you get those who have visited to keep coming back?

Keeping your pages fresh with photos, videos, articles and links is a key factor in creating and sustaining online traffic. However, this can be challenging for a number of reasons. Here are five helpful tips for creating and maintaining traffic to your social-networking sites.

1. Repurpose
You probably have a ton of material that would be great to post on social-networking sites. If available, a one good resource is your organization's e- newsletter. Many times there are brief snippets or intros to articles that work well in SM because they’re short and usually include a photo of some kind.

Another option is scanning brochures or direct-mail appeals as PDFs and making them available for downloading on your SM sites. This works really well with educational materials. Even your annual report is a viable piece of content to keep the flow of information moving. Make it available to download, tweet the link and have it direct back to your official Web site for download. Many marketing efforts can be repurposed, tweaked and abridged to allow for repurposing on social networks.

2. Conversation and contribution
Everyone gets writer's block. When this happens, it sometimes helps to find outside stimuli. Odds are you aren’t the only organization of your kind. Visiting Web sites and blogs of other organizations that do similar work might help spark an idea for an original blog post of your own. Commenting on other sites also comes in handy.

When I’m suffering from writer's block it helps to just read other authors’ or organizations’ blogs and comment on their entries. Reading someone else’s work gets the mind moving and starts a dialogue. Some of my favorite writings have been spawned from comment threads in blogs where alternative viewpoints create an atmosphere for breeding new ideas.